Welcome to the new age of alloparenting
In honor of Mother's Day, an invitation to embrace an ancient, deeply human role in a contemporary way
Hello and welcome to my recently retitled publication, The Center for Numinous World-Building. I’m excited to share perspectives and provocations, as I work with collaborators to create spaces that bring out the best in ourselves and each other.
Consider the millions of individuals around us who have smaller bodies and higher voices than we do. These, our youngest citizens, are our future colleagues, collaborators, leaders, and muses. They are our society’s wellspring of innovation, imagination, solutions, prosperity.
Generation Alpha. The foundation we are building for their brains is our investment in a thriving future. And I believe this investment is the responsibility of every one of us, whether or not we are technically a parent.
I’m writing this from my perspective of a citizen, artist, professional, and deeply loving aunt who is devoted to creating experiences, programs, and places that fully center the needs of other people’s kids: I am an alloparent. I invite you to join me.
What is alloparenting?
Alloparenting is the practice of centering the needs of children and youth that others brought into the world. It has played a crucial role in the evolution of our species. It's time to refresh our commitment to it, and examine what it looks like now.
“If salvation and help are to come, it is from the child, for the child is the constructor of [humans] and so of society. The child is endowed with an inner power which can guide us to a more enlightened future.” - Dr. Montessori, Education for a New World, p.1
Alloparenting has been around a long while. It’s what made the primates that evolved into human beings so successful. We are here by the grace of those who alloparented us across millenia, we must alloparent by virtue of the way our species works.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy goes so far as to demonstrate, in Mothers and Others, not only how alloparenting is essential to child survival and flourishing, but is part of what has cultivated human traits of compassion and cooperation. “Without alloparents,” she writes, “there never would have been a human species.” (p. 109)
Compared to human society today, primate society was simple. It was easier to be an ape alloparent; easier to see what's to be done: keep those little bodies safe, and clean, and well-fed. Playing, learning, thriving. Today, alloparenting is somewhat different.
Alloparenting today
Just like apes, human parents need a posse of front-line alloparents who share the work of childrearing. But human society is more complex than ape society. Our young today need more than just direct care from loving sitters and aunties. Our collective parenting strategy needs to evolve to match the times.
Today, alloparenting is carried out in three ways: direct care, curation, and architecting. Embracing our roles as alloparents, at any of the three scales we have capacity to influence, is one of the most significant, high leverage things we can do as change-makers today.
Three levels of parenting attention
Parenting attention now has to operate at the following three scales:
Direct care: Taking care of individual childrens’ bodies, minds, and souls.
Curation: Helping fill the world that the child lives in with appropriate and enriching artifacts and activities.
Architecting: Creating the spaces and contexts that meet the needs of children and youth.
The domain of direct care is fairly straightforward. Caregivers do on-the-ground activities like observing the child, listening to her, practicing self-awareness and self-care, learning, playing, singing, story-telling, protecting the child, cooking, cleaning, organizing, transporting, and maintaining facilities. This requires calm presence, receptivity, patience, conscientiousness, reliability, curiosity.
Curation is a distinct skill set. If you are a curator, you have the authority to select the contents of a space the child inhabits. To do this responsibly involves research, prompt engineering, networking, reading/reviewing/playtesting, selecting, experimenting, presenting, reflecting. This requires sensitivity, discernment, humility, persistence, courage, good taste, and time. It is often less about removing unwanted influences from the child’s attention; more about deliberately introducing influences that express enriching values.
Finally, as an architect, you may be very remote from direct care and even curation. But your choices have a decisive impact on everyone involved in care. You are literally shaping contexts, defining what’s possible and impossible for children and families — in real life and virtual spaces. Your work involves imagining, designing, funding, building, and co-creating. Architects must exhibit patience, big picture views and long-game attention, systems thinking, and integrity that allows you to co-create, in coherence with their context, and on larger scales.
Welcome to the new age of alloparenting
The era of pretending to be apes and assuming that direct care is the only kind of care that kids need is over. We need to embrace the complexity of our culture, step into our honor and become the alloparents that Generation Alpha has been waiting for.
Our species’ resilience and hopes for a bright future are correlated with our choices, every day, about how we will invest our attention to ensure the young people around us are growing strong and sturdy.
If there is a family with young children in your life, learn enough about child development so that you’re able to provide direct care responsibly, and come forward to offer it with energy and humility.
If you have authority over the contents of a space that kids frequent — your home, your store, your publication, or even your iPhone — I invite you to take some time this week to reflect on how you could take your curation up a notch to ensure the contents of this corner of the world is supporting the brain development of your future coworkers and collaborators.
If you have the privilege of making decisions about how an entire context functions as an architect — whether it is a region, a city, a neighborhood, a building development; a company that employs parents; or an entire online space such as a device, tool or platform kids use — the time has come.
To those who architect virtual spaces: other people’s kids aren’t an afterthought. Now is the moment to go into your heart and reflect on what aspects of the place you’re building are anti-child. There’s still time to live up to the noble spirit of all the parents who made you who you are, and pass it forward. What brave choice could you make today?
Parenting has always been a practice of world-building, and I believe today all of us are called forth to be more deliberate in how we do this across each levels of influence.
In honor of mothers and Mother’s Day, and in awareness of our responsibility to support them and lessen their burdens, I invite you to share this post publicly; pass it along to someone who you’d like to see in one of these roles; or thank an alloparent who’s making the world a little better for mothers and kids.
Coming up
Through this publication and my forthcoming book, I’ll be sharing more about the practice of alloparenting. In the meantime, here is what I’m up to this week:
If you’re a tango dancer in Western MA, I’d love to see you at my creativity workshop in Northampton or my learning strategies lecture in Brattleboro.
Next Thursday May 15th, my partner Stefan is leading a free session on Zoom offering a practice that invites the experience of embodied interconnectedness.